I turned to Harris, wondering at the dodge. “How long have you lived in Titanshade?”
“Little less than a year.”
“Why’d you come?” I squinted, looking him over. Most of his clothing was concealed by his cloak, except for the cuffs and collars of dress clothes. But he also wore thick-soled boots, the kind I associated with bikers. “You moved up here before the manna strike, when the smart money said the oil wells were drying out, and the city was about to contract.”
“Because the other city-states weren’t hiring at the time. Plus, the cold never bothered me too much.” He smiled again. “I didn’t realize that it was quite so warm in the ritzy parts of town.”
That sounded like a polite generalization. Something he was hoping we’d skip over. I did, but pushed back into another topic he didn’t seem excited to talk about. “Why are there three of you?”
His smile faded, and he whistled through his teeth. “Because this isn’t the only one today.”
“What?” I pointed at the apartment door. “Like this? Coming back to life?”
“No. I meant people are attacking each other for no reason. And Carter,” he dropped his voice, “they’re hearing the buzz, like we did at the festival.” He glanced down the hall, in the direction the other DOs had gone, his eyes wide and serious. “It’s all I can say right now. Believe me, you’ll hear more soon enough.”
He patted me on the back and walked away, leaving me to wonder what could be causing other events, and whether I had anything to do with them. In something of a daze, I headed down to the street. There I found Jax seated on the building’s front stoop, notepad and pencil in hand as he traced the day’s events.
“You find anything enlightening in there?” I sat next to him, the rough stone steps cold to the touch in the Borderlands air.
“Not yet,” he said. At some point his head bandage had come loose, and he’d unwound the gauze and tucked it into his breast pocket, like a blood-stained pocket square.
The crowd had mostly dispersed, the awe and excitement surrounding the caravan’s arrival fading away like early morning window frost. By now, the Barekusu were probably entering the city’s center, where the rich and influential crowd would be doing their best to appear richer and more influential than they actually were.
“Guyer wants me to call her,” I said. “Probably wants to accuse me of warping magic, or doing mind control, or something else asinine.”
“So call her,” he said. “You’re not going to find out what she wants by speculating.”
I took a breath and chewed my lip, then plunged ahead. “You know I didn’t do anything to that body up there, right?”
“No. I don’t know,” he said. “No one does. That’s the problem.”
We locked eyes, and I looked away first.
“But I doubt you had anything to do with it,” he said. “I saw the people interacting with their radios, and I heard the buzzing on the televisions. I don’t think that was all from a single cop with an inexplicable manna connection.”
“Either way,” I said. “We’ve got a murder to solve.”
“Do we?” He ran a careful hand over sore head plates. “Because I’m pretty sure I heard Donna confess.”
“She can confess all she wants. But whatever happened to Saul’s body, to Bobby Kearn . . .” I sighed, my breath creating a fleeting, misty cloud. “Whatever’s going on, it’s much stranger than a fight between roommates.”
“Saul Petrevisch was a small-time user and an even smaller-time dealer. Whatever magic is happening, it’s expensive. People’s lives are worth less than magic in this town. You taught me that.”
I wanted to insist he was wrong, that everyone’s life is worth an infinite amount of manna. I also wanted to tell him that the good guys always win and the guilty parties go to jail. But I could only tell so many laughable lies in a given day. Instead, I moved on to a more pressing issue.
“It’s important that you not talk to Talena about this,” I said. “Not more than you have to.” There was no point in dragging someone I cared about even further into the strange quagmire of my life.
He blinked. “Is there anyone less qualified than you to give me relationship advice when it comes to Talena?” He laughed, then shook his head. “I can handle it just fine.”
“Nobody can handle anything about Talena, and you know it.” I huffed hot breath into my hands, and rubbed the stumps of my missing fingers. The chill air was starting to make them ache.
Jax clacked his biting jaws. “We’re not having this conversation here.”
“If you’re pissed because I kept the other thing to myself—”
He interrupted me. “You thought you were keeping it to yourself. That’s the problem. You think you’re a closed book, but everyone around you knows you’re going through something. I don’t know where you get off acting like it doesn’t affect us.”
“Us?”
“Yes. Me, Talena, everyone else on Homicide. Everyone who has to guess what your mood’s going to be like on any given day before we ask for something outrageous like, ‘Can you pass the vinegar?’” He shoved the notepad and pencil back in his jacket pocket. “You’re brilliant at what you do,” he said. “And that’s a damn lucky thing, because otherwise no one would put up with your BS.” He stood and brushed off the back of his pants, shedding the dirt of the Borderlands stoop. “You make your phone call. I’ll be in the car.”
He walked away, cutting through the pedestrian traffic and jaywalking across the street.
I grunted a note of disagreement, but he was already too far to hear it. Regardless, I still owed Guyer a call. I stood, strolled to the nearest pay phone, and dropped in my coin. I dialed her pager number and left the number off the pay phone
